Technologists around the world came together and rapidly built a system for Haitians to request help in the wake of devastating earthquake. Using the internet to organise themselves, developers, communications experts and humanitarian organisations created a system to gather emergency requests using text messages that won praise from emergency officials and support from the US State Department.

Ten radio stations still operating in Haiti helped spread the word about the emergency shortcode. They also quickly put up posters, and the US Department of State helped publicise it, announcing it via their official Twitter account and elsewhere.

They worked with 10,000 Haitian volunteers to help translate the messages and other volunteers helped to structure "mountains of data" coming into the system, Hersman wrote. The volunteers of Mission 4636 posted this on the Ushahidi blog:

We are the volunteer translators of Mission 4636. We span six time zones and seven languages on any given night. We are students, medics, stay at home mothers, archivists, firefighters, and software developers. We are the quiet force behind Ushahidi Haiti & we give a voice to the lost.

Since it started, Ushahidi has received nearly 100,000 reports concerning Haiti, and organisers are working to create a system, Swift River, to help filter those reports so that the most urgent ones get attention quickly.

One thing that is impressive about this effort is how distributed, collaborative and organised it is, and they have blogged about how they kept this volunteer project focused. UPDATE: Meier says that work by volunteers at a situation room at the Fletcher School at Tufts University was key in organising these efforts. Again for further detail, you can read his comment below.

CrisisCamps to help with these projects sprung up in cities around the world, including here in London.

A decade of crowdsourced crisis projects

Developers also created an application to help collect information on missing people in Haiti. After creating several applications, they came to a decision to focus their efforts on a single app hosted at Google.

Every time a disaster like this happens, the response has gotten more sophisticated and better organised. The response in Haiti by this volunteer army has been deeply impressive, and they have built up the expertise so that when the next disaster happens, they'll have new tools to help speed aid to victims in need.